Enfilade

From Liverpool UP:

Victoria Avery and Melissa Calaresu, eds., The Pineapple from Domestication to Commodification: Re-presenting a Global Fruit (Liverpool University Press, 2025), 272 pages, ISBN: 978-1836245933, $115. Proceedings of the British Academy.

The pineapple’s ‘discovery’ by European colonisers in the late fifteenth century and its remarkable global trajectory—from an early modern object of rarity, desire, and horticultural innovation to a cheap, canned consumable and fair-trade logo today—is a story of modern globalisation. The Pineapple from Domestication to Commodification is a wide-ranging, interdisciplinary volume intended to provoke timely debate and generate radical rethinking of an overly familiar fruit with associations from luxury to kitsch. It deliberately problematizes the pineapple by investigating understudied tensions between its representational power and the historical and political contexts of its worldwide production and consumption. This connects the global and local at the heart of contemporary debates about the nature and origins of our food. It will have cross-disciplinary appeal for scholars of politics, economics, history, plant sciences, food, and material culture as well as for broader audiences interested in food, gardening, the environment, and visual arts.

Victoria Avery has been Keeper of European Sculpture & Decorative Arts at the Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge, since 2010 prior to which she was Associate Professor in the Department of Art History at the University of Warwick. Vicky’s primary field of expertise is European sculpture from 1400 to the present day, but she has broad knowledge of the materiality, making, usage, collecting, and display of early modern European decorative arts. She has curated numerous research-led interdisciplinary exhibitions including Feast & Fast: The Art of Food in Europe, 1450–1800, from which this book emerges.
Melissa Calaresu is the Neil McKendrick Lecturer in History at Gonville and Caius College, University of Cambridge, and co-curator, with Victoria Avery, of the Fitzwilliam Museum exhibition and accompanying catalogue, Feast & Fast: The Art of Food in Europe, 1450–1800 (Philip Wilson, 2019). She is a cultural historian whose research interests include the history of food, the representation of urban space, and material culture in early modern Italy. Recent publications have focused on selling food on the street, urban kitchens, and the Grand Tour of the eighteenth-century Welsh painter, Thomas Jones. She is co-editor of the journal Global Food History.

c o n t e n t s

List of Tables
Notes on Contributors
Acknowledgements

1  Introduction | The Multi-Faceted Global Pineapple: Motifs, Materialities, and Meanings — Melissa Calaresu and Victoria Avery

Part I | The Global Pineapple
2  From Wild Pine to Domesticated Delicacy: Metabolic and Evolutionary Diversity of the Pineapple — Howard Griffiths
3  From the Caribs to Carmen Miranda: Pineapples Across Time and Space — Rebecca Earle
4  Pineapple as Palimpsest: Island Landscapes as Iconography and Identity in the Anglophone Caribbean — Alissandra Cummins
5  Paradise Lost: The Pineapple Between Tropical Imaginaries and American Mythologies — Melissa L. Caldwell

Part II | The Cultivated Pineapple
6  Transporting Images, Transplanted Fruits: The Pineapple, the Jesuits and the Afro-Asia Trade — Eszter Csillag
7  ‘A Box of Fresh Pineapples to the Holy Father’: Pineapples and the Worlds of Sociability and Science in Eighteenth-Century Rome — Lavinia Maddaluno
8  Princely Fruit: The Pineapple in Print in Old Regime France — E. C. Spary

Part III | The Replicated Pineapple
9  Iconic: The Pineapple in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Painting — Julie Hochstrasser
10  ‘A Profusion of Pines’: Representations of the Pineapple in Architecture and the Decorative Arts in the Long Eighteenth Century — Kathryn Jones
11  ‘A Profusion of Metaphor’: Modern Literature’s Pineapples — Kasia Boddy

Part IV | The Political Pineapple
12  A Liminal Commodity: Catch-Cropping, Chinese Capitalists and the Colonial State in the Pineapple Industry of Singapore, 1900s–1930s — Michael Yeo
13  A Settler Colonial Experiment: The Pineapple and American Hawai‘i — Henry Knight Lozano
14  Dirty Pineapples from Costa Rica — Martin Mowforth

Bibliography
Index